ABSTRACT
The family of William Trego Webb was based in Suffolk, where his father, the Rev. James Webb, was a Baptist minister in Ipswich. The poems collected in Indian Lyrics are written in a variety of forms and metres, and cover many different aspects of their writer’s experience of India. Several recall themes long familiar to the British in India, such as the mock-heroic ‘Ode to a Mosquito’, and ‘Album Verses’, bewailing the heat and exhorting the punkah-wallah to greater efforts. Several reviews of Indian Lyrics in the British press commented favourably on its ‘agreeable exotic character’, and the ‘local colour about [the] lyrics which make them pleasant and amusing reading’. The Calcutta Review considers the work at length, and distinguishes between the author’s ‘effective’ depiction of indigenous Indian themes and subjects, and his representation of British society in India.
